Software Tools & Skills Summary

In addition to our web designers' tools,
IT Partnership's programmers specialise in the following
Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools created by Borland,
Microsoft, and the open source community. We use these
tools to create PC and Pocket PC (i.e. PDA based) local
and Internet based applications and databases.

Borland's Delphi is an excellent structured, extendible,
highly object orientated language, suitable for multi-user
LAN applications running under a flavour of MS Windows. The
latest version of Delphi is equally well suited to creating
.net applications as Microsoft's languages.

PHP is the preferred web development language of the open
source community. The PHP language is comparatively fast,
structured, and supremely well suited for implementing interactive
web sites and online applications.

Microsoft Windows Mobile
and Pocket Windows PDA Custom Software Development.
IT Partnership are leading developers of bespoke software
and custom applications for PDA mobile devices. We have 12
months experience developing PDA applications for major UK
and European customers. PDA applications are ideal for enabling
mobile workers (especially sales staff) to benefit from this
exciting technology.

Microsoft C# (pronounced C Sharp) is Microsoft's preferred
language for future proof .net application development. Being
a development of Delphi it is well structured and fully object
orientated. It is fast and powerful and can be used for the
creation of good PC and PDA applications, but the development
environment is still a bit flaky and unreliable.

Microsoft Visual Basic is an easy to use language that is
good for rapidly creating simpler applications, or when interoperation
with of MS products or file formats is required. It is particularly
powerful when used within Microsoft Access to develop database
driven applications.

Microsoft Access is a powerful single user and small multi-user
database. It is possible to create very sophisticated applications
using MS Access, and its reporting facilities are superb.

Microsoft SQL Server is Microsoft's flagship database server
based on Structured Query Language (SQL, pronounced "sequel").
The benefit of all SQL databases is that the technology facilitates
high speed database operations even over a limited bandwidth,
so is ideal for Internet applications.

MySQL is the most popular SQL Server database on the planet!
This open source database is fast, reliable, and is increasingly
becoming as powerful as the incumbent heavyweights - MS SQL
Server and Oracle. We have found MySQL a delight to work
with, and now recommend it in preference to much more expensive
alternatives.

Active Server Pages (ASP) is a flavour of MS Visual Basic
for creating database driven or programmed web sites. Using
ASP we can write multi-user applications that can run either
locally or over a company's Intranet or over the Internet,
using only a browser on the user's PC. ASP is perfect when
a wide user base is wanted, when installation of bespoke
software would be a burden, or when network bandwidth is
limited.